Oh, Christ, you're just oh so clever.

Seriously, if someone tells me that for fun they like to pretend to be the sort of person that hangs children upside down by their ankles so they can be slowly exsanguinated into a fountain as a party snack, then I am going to back slowly away from that person, the opinions of BPD-addled social workers be damned.

Quote from: Adric;725192True, a stated goal doesn't guarantee success in that goal. I'll amend my statement to say "I think that a game that is successful at representing a more narrow focus of genre  is going to better emulate it's subject matter than  game that is successful at being a general system.

I think V:TM still tried to be too many things. "All sorts of Vampires!" is actually a pretty broad genre these days and means lots of different things to different people. By specific, I mean picking a more narrow concept, like "Vampires trying to live everyday lives within mortal society" or "Vampires manipulating mortal governments and organizations over centuries" or "Villagers and a Vampire hunter hunt the all-powerful Vampire that plagues the Town" With those 3 different premises, you would create 3 different games that make your players behave in very different ways, because the characters are aiming for different things, and will be using different skillsets.

Having a great group of experienced players that you gel well with and can improvise with is awesome, but not everybody has that, and some people that will be new to a game will be new to the entire hobby. for them a more focused game that concentrates on the kinds of experience they want, and tells them how to achieve it is going to be a lot more useful that a very thick book of generic rules that won't even apply to the kind of game they want to play.

I would go the opposite way.

I would say that Vampire was a good and sucessful game because it was more open and you could use it to play any of the vampire tropes you mentioned. This is a strength not a weakness. Yes for an individual game you might narrow it down and for a table you might focus more on the gamist part than the narative part or whatever.
One of D&D strengths is that it can be used to play any sort of fantasy game. Yes there are rules that don't work well but I think these are inherent issues in the rules that I change for all games rather than for a particular genre of game. The d20 fantasy engine itself can be used to cover almost anything from tolkein to lieber, from dungeondelves to courtly intrigue.
Vampire was similar in that it covered Urban horror and especially tied to the other WoD books it aimed to cover a range of play styles and genres. Now it may be true that the game was 'meant' to be played in a certain gothy depressed 6th form drama student style but the fact the it could infact be used at tables with wargamers, thespies and storytellers all I think indicates a strong game rather than a flawed one.

GNS seems to have an issue in that it asigns a single motivation and style choice to all players which is of course rot. Almost by defintion if you mapped folks on a GNS map no one would actually sit in an apex we would all be a mix of different preferences. So it makes sense for games to reflect that and for GMs to flavour their tables with a mix.
By the way for me this is the same argument as the one that says any table top RPG that uses a narrative control devise like Bennies is a storygame.

Quote from: daniel_ream;725206Oh, Christ, you're just oh so clever.

You're a moron with no imagination. That's all there is to it - the original statement just deserved an answer on the level at which it was given.

Quote from: daniel_ream;725206Oh, Christ, you're just oh so clever.

Seriously, if someone tells me that for fun they like to pretend to be the sort of person that hangs children upside down by their ankles so they can be slowly exsanguinated into a fountain as a party snack, then I am going to back slowly away from that person, the opinions of BPD-addled social workers be damned.

Y'know, with Poison'd and its beheaded child throat rape already mentioned within this topic, and a general meltdown over the author not really meaning what they said about brain damage + child molestation analogies (did he? didn't he?), this might be The Bestest Shitstorm Ever.

Reality TV is almost banal to this. And I'm not even done with the final season of Hoarders!

I'm gonna need more popcorn. Don't do anything too exciting while I'm away.
:nono:

Quote from: TristramEvans;724871Ive always been torn on "system matters", because it creates the expectation that one system is objectivelly better than another for a purpose, whereas its rarely that simple and there are factors beyond system design, like familiarity, aesthetics, and player motivations.

I think this is largely true. "System matters" if a whole lot of other stuff is held constant, but that other stuff might be making the greater causal contribution over all to the RPGing experience.

I have had a very stable group for over 15 years now, so in my case all that other stuff is constant, and I found The Forge essays helped me identify various features of systems I was playing and thinking about and work out how I could use them, or drop them, to improve my game.

I'm not 100% sure what you meant by "aesthetics", but I think that also relates to something @Iosue said upthread: that there are other features of mechanics (what The Forge calls "techniques") which can be very important for the RPGing experience. For instance, just judging from what they post, it seems that there are many RPGers who find technically crunchy and complex mechanics an obstacle to immersion in the fiction. This seems to have been at least one of the factors that influenced the reception of 4e D&D, but it's not really a feature of the system that is a primary concern from a GNS poit of view. (I have read useful comments from Edwards and other Forgists about technique issues, but often in forum posts rather than the GNS essays.)

Quote from: Gunslinger;724875Impact at the table is only what the individual purveyor brings away from the discussion whether it be a new game, a concept, or an idea to bring to the table that works for the group you're playing with.



Personally I've found some value even it's just to reanalyze how me and my own go about our gaming.

I agree with this too.

Quote from: CRKrueger;724928Edwards who never understood "Simulationism" at all

This I don't really agree with, though I seem to be in a minority. I have GMed a lot of Rolemaster (two campaigns both to over 20th level, running in combination for nearly 20 years). I think Edwards' discussion of simulationism, and especially purist-for-system simulationism, fits well with my experience.

I also find his discussion of high concept simulationism insightful, but I recognise that the label "simulationism" here is highly contentious. I don't know that I would say he doesn't understand this mode of play, but it seems fairly clear he doesn't enjoy it in large doses.

Quote from: S'mon;724983BTW what Pemerton does as GM looks to me much more like GDS Dramatism than anything from GNS, so I'm not sure he's really a Forgist whatever he says.

The key issues for me are (i) who gets to decide what counts as the (morally) right or wrong choices within the fiction (eg what should the PCs do; who is the BBEG; etc), and (ii) who gets to decide what the focus of play will be in story terms (eg what sorts of places will the PCs go to, what sort of people will they meet, at least in general terms; etc).

In both cases I prefer that the players rather than the GM have the overall authority here (though when it comes to the details of scene-framing I favour GM authority, so that the players aren't tempted to squib). And I've long disliked mechanical alignment (I dropped it in the mid-80s), and I find Edwards's simulationism essay gives a good explanation for the connection between my play preferences and my dislike of mechanical alignment.

As I understand it, the play I like is narrativist play (Edwards's term) and at least one mode of dramatist play (John Kim's term?). In his "Story Now" essay Edwards suggests that the difference in terminology is, at least in general terms, merely terminological - he wants to use "drama" to describe a resolution mode and so wants something else to describe the "dramatist" orientation of play.

I think Edwards has a clear inconsistency in his essay between his formal definition of narrativism and the examples he gives: he classifies The Dying Earth as supporting narrativist play, although it doesn't satisfy his formal requirement of having players address a moral or heavily thematic question of human existence.

This sort of gap between formal definition and actual use is a common problem in critical and sociological theories. (Eg Durkheim has the same problem in his definition of "social fact" in The Rules of Sociological Method, and Weber has the same problem in his definition of "authority" in Economy and Society.) My general experience is that the use, and the general conception to which it gives rise, tends to be more helpful than the formal definition. I think Edwards is the same here, and that's why I think he takes the view that narrativist play is more common than is sometimes supposed. It's not that people are playing games with heavy moral themes but haven't noticed - it's that people are playing games where the players are expected to inject their own evaluative perspective and content as part of play (be that heavy evaluation if playing some serious game, or light hearted somewhat cynical evaluation if playing The Dying Earth), and that's pretty much what narrativism means as an approach to play. To the extent that that's also what dramatism means as an approach to play, I'm happy to be a dramatist too.

Quote from: -E.;724989I don't need special meta-game mechanics to add flavor or drive address of premise: we do that fine at the human level.

I don't need special meta-game mechanics either - I've GMed narrativist Rolemaster and narrativist 4e. (Both pretty light - I don't think Edwards, Baker or Paul Czege would particularly care for my games.)

More than needing meta-game mechanics, I find that the sort of play I like can be easier when some other mechanical features are absent, which distract the focus of play away from flavour/theme and into the mere minutiae of the ingame fiction. (Rolemaster healing rules are one example of this; encumbrance or overland travel rules are examples from many systems.)

I also think that even vanilla narrativist play can benefit from having points where player choices can be mechanically expressed. I think this is why I prefer Rolemaster to Runequest, even though I think RQ is fairly obviously the more elegant game. In RM, attack and parry come from a common pool and are allocated round-by-round - and in making that allocation the player can thereby give effect to choices (within the confines of resolving a melee combat - I wouldn't say RM, or 4e for that matter, is very versatile in the range of themes/premises it can address). Whereas in RQ these are separate skills which are simply rolled by the player - there is no space there for the player's choices to be injected so as to effect the outcome. I think this makes it harder to use RQ to inject theme/premise within the resolution of melee combat.

Quote from: Arminius;725189A ways back, Pemerton wrote that he didn't see GNS theory as containing predictive claims. I thought that was interesting, since I've generally taken that for granted and (as far as I could tell), I've seen such claims made on its behalf by its fans. So I went and had a look at two of the earliest essays, "System Does Matter" and "GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory".

Some of your quotes are evaluations (eg "horrendous mistake"). These aren't mere expressions of preference - that's not what I said Edwards is doing, and that's because it's not what I think he is doing - but they aren't predictions either.

The other stuff reads to me like the standard analytical style of criticism or interpretive sociology. You yourself note that it doesn't satisfy natural science standards of provability, because the "inevitable" outcomes cover most of the options (and there is the additional notion of "drift" - which is used to explain how people achieve fun play with incoherent games).

Many people are sceptical of interpretive sociology and similar methods (eg Popper in volume 2 of The Open Society). I personally tend to find it the only sociology worth reading, but not for its predictive power: for its interpretive power. For instance, does the notion that an "incoherent" game will tend to yield fun only if their is "drift", and in the absence of consensus on such "drift" will yield a power struggle, shed new light on the experience of RPGing? For me the answer is yes - for instance, I've been involved in such power struggles resulting from different parts of the game pushing against one another in terms of the authority granted to player and GM.

Others probably have different experiences.

When the stakes of the critical inquiry are, for instance, the nature of the Greek currency crisis or the fate of industrial civilisation, it probably matters to try and reach a well-defended view. Fit with personal experience wouldn't be enough - one would have to do serious historical research, for instance, and perhaps anthropological research too, to see how the candidate interpretations fit with a wide range of human experience.

But when it comes to RPGing the stakes aren't very high. In this respect it seems to me more like the criticism of art or literature: if I find a critic whom I like, and whose reviews and essays speak to me, I'm not going to be especially troubled simply by the fact that there are others who don't like the critic. And it doesn't matter to me that The Forge is not illuminating for others' play experiences - on its own, that doesn't change the fact that I find it useful.

(A non-RPG example: I found Hobbit II to be not as good as Hobbit I, and confirmed and developed this experience in conversation with my partner after we saw the film together. Likewise for the more recent Wolverine film and the first (Origins) one. When I get home and find that Rotten Tomatoes ranks them the other way around, I note that I'm out of step with a lot of critical opinion, and maybe think about the film a bit more, but it doesn't as such make me doubt the validity of my experience and the judgement I've made based on it. If what was at stake was some question of historical explanation, things would be different - and I change my mind all the time in response to reading disagreements about matters from historians or social theorists who adduce a wider variety of relevant experience than I have brought to mind in reaching my initial opinion.)

Quote from: Arminius;725171I think the Forge has been somewhat successful in this respect, but not really by the means one would suppose if one believed the theory. The first is that awareness of the games and the ideological discussion are largely transmitted in the same channels, so if you see a Forge game and you find other people who want to play it with you, there's a good chance they share your taste and your expectation of how the game should play. Whereas when I've seen posts about people trying to introduce the games into their existing groups, the results are often unsuccessful. The games themselves aren't doing much to get people on the same page. (This could be called cherry-picking, as an analytical flaw when making generalized claims.)

I don't know, it worked for me and my group. I got into more indie-themed games and asked my regular D&D group if they'd like to try one, they said yes, and they liked it. Cut to a few years later and we divide our time fairly evenly between D&D and more indie stuff (principally my own game).

Some groups won't like it, true, but our group is pretty standard. No-one else is on forums or has heard of GNS or the like.

I think where these things fail is when people are trying to convert their group by force or trickery rather than just seeing honestly if anyone wants to give it a try. Just like with any other game really.

Quote from: TristramEvans;725125To say that Vampire needed to be focused so that the system forced people to play one way is essentially saying everyone playing the other way were having badwrongfun.

Systems can't force anyone to do anything. The point is that some people felt Vampire offered them a kind of game that mechanically it didn't support (in fact it massively undermined it). Most people probably didn't want that kind of game experience and were perfectly happy with the one that Vampire actually provided. But for those people who did want a narrativist kind of Vampire game, achieving that kind of play would require some changes or a different ruleset altogether.

Quote from: soviet;725343Systems can't force anyone to do anything.

True. But they can influence to one degree or another.

 

QuoteBut for those people who did want a narrativist kind of Vampire game, achieving that kind of play would require some changes or a different ruleset altogether.

I disagree. Its all in how one uses the rules. Sure theres systems that FORCE a "narrative" style of play, but people have been playing that way for years before those systems existed.

Quote from: TristramEvans;725348I disagree. Its all in how one uses the rules. Sure theres systems that FORCE a "narrative" style of play, but people have been playing that way for years before those systems existed.

Sure, but some things can actually get in the way of doing what they want. Witness the problems some people who focus on immersion have had with 4e. They like immersion, they don't necessarily need rules to help their immersion, but some rules can kill it stone dead.

It may be fair to say that in Vampire the main barriers to narrativism are deeply imbedded pieces of GM advice moreso than actual rules, but they are there nonetheless.

Quote from: pemerton;725252The key issues for me are (i) who gets to decide what counts as the (morally) right or wrong choices within the fiction (eg what should the PCs do; who is the BBEG; etc), and (ii) who gets to decide what the focus of play will be in story terms (eg what sorts of places will the PCs go to, what sort of people will they meet, at least in general terms; etc).

In both cases I prefer that the players rather than the GM have the overall authority here (though when it comes to the details of scene-framing I favour GM authority, so that the players aren't tempted to squib). And I've long disliked mechanical alignment (I dropped it in the mid-80s), and I find Edwards's simulationism essay gives a good explanation for the connection between my play preferences and my dislike of mechanical alignment.

As I understand it, the play I like is narrativist play (Edwards's term) and at least one mode of dramatist play (John Kim's term?). In his "Story Now" essay Edwards suggests that the difference in terminology is, at least in general terms, merely terminological - he wants to use "drama" to describe a resolution mode and so wants something else to describe the "dramatist" orientation of play.

I think Edwards has a clear inconsistency in his essay between his formal definition of narrativism and the examples he gives: he classifies The Dying Earth as supporting narrativist play, although it doesn't satisfy his formal requirement of having players address a moral or heavily thematic question of human existence.

This sort of gap between formal definition and actual use is a common problem in critical and sociological theories. (Eg Durkheim has the same problem in his definition of "social fact" in The Rules of Sociological Method, and Weber has the same problem in his definition of "authority" in Economy and Society.) My general experience is that the use, and the general conception to which it gives rise, tends to be more helpful than the formal definition. I think Edwards is the same here, and that's why I think he takes the view that narrativist play is more common than is sometimes supposed. It's not that people are playing games with heavy moral themes but haven't noticed - it's that people are playing games where the players are expected to inject their own evaluative perspective and content as part of play (be that heavy evaluation if playing some serious game, or light hearted somewhat cynical evaluation if playing The Dying Earth), and that's pretty much what narrativism means as an approach to play. To the extent that that's also what dramatism means as an approach to play, I'm happy to be a dramatist too.

Hm, ok then. So even Edwards doesn't use Narrativism to mean actual Narrativism (Exploration-of-Premise)!
So by your given standard the shared narrative authority stuff from S John Ross (I think) in 4e DMG2 makes 4e D&D a Narrativist game (I too have used the suggestions there, in moderation). But this Narrativism isn't really distinct from GDS Dramatism. OK.

Here's my main disagreements with GNS theory.

1) The idea that the GNS modes are a useful primary categorization of game styles.

In my experience, they're not.  There are players that have a strong preference for premise-focused games, and they will tend to like 'N' games, but I don't believe that the GNS division is actually useful in the general case.  Too many games simply don't fit, and too many games fit in the same 'division' that are too different from each other.  Many players' primary motivations are not the GNS modes anyway, and so that classification isn't particularly useful.

I prefer to look at player needs, instead, rather than perform a high level division.  While recognizing that people play games for different reasons is a good thing, I disagree with the idea that there's a universal three-way split that can be done to all RPGs.  If anything, this kind of split implicitly discourages exploration of game styles that don't fit in one of the GNS modes.

Exploration of premise is a great need.  "Simulation" and "Gamism" seem more like buckets of weakly-related needs.  I disagree that they're a useful primary categorization mechanism.

The idea that GNS modes are a good categorization mechanism has one effect, especially combined with the idea that a game should only follow a single GNS mode.  It tends to produce games that are very strongly based around exploration of premise.  For people who have strong needs of games that do this, that's a great value from the theory.

2) The idea that adherence to a single GNS mode is required.

Disagree, full stop.  While I find some merit to this idea when it comes to the simulation/game divide (at the extremes), I find that premise, specifically, can be explored within either of those structures, and game/simulation techniques can be used to enhance the exploration of (certain types of) premise.

3) Inconsistency (I hate the term "incoherence") of design is primarily based on the GNS modes.

I think of designs as being inconsistent when parts of the design make the goals of other parts of the design difficult - my example earlier being the "big damn hero" game where you have a high random chance of dying to some arbitrary mook.

This is a generally useful concept in my view.  Focusing it solely on GNS modes is unnecessarily limiting, and of very little value unless you accept the GNS modes as a primary categorization, which I explicitly don't.

4) Drift is a result of not following a single GNS mode strongly (incoherence)

Again, see previous comments on GNS modes as a primary categorization mechanism.

Above and beyond that, though, I see "drift" or rules modification (including de-emphasis or ignoring rules) as a result of a particular game system not matching the expectations/needs of a gaming group - regardless of how well designed that system is.  An inconsistent (by my definition) design will make it hard for it to effectively meet *any* needs, and so will more likely "drift" in play, but any time that there's a difference between the needs the players (including GM) of a game expect to meet through play, and the needs that the system meets, you'll likely see an amount of drift.

A game cannot force a particular play style.  It can support or encourage certain types of play, but it cannot force a play style.  If a group wants a certain type of game/experience, they'll get it.

5) Power struggles are a result of "incoherent" design

Power struggles amongst players are a result of players having different expectations.  They only inherently lead to power struggles if you assume that people can't talk as rational adults and compromise.

Can a "coherent" design help this?  Possibly - but even the best design is subject to interpretation of those reading it.  And if you have players that cannot compromise, then that is a social issue that must be resolved - relying upon an appeal to authority in the rules to resolve this seems like a band-aid on the core problem *at best*.

I personally see illusionism as the biggest offender in terms of power struggles, as it explicitly sets the stage for the GM to promise one thing (your choices matter!) while simultaneously ensuring that they don't.  The technique tells both players and GMs that they have control/power over the direction of the game, which just sets up conflict.

But illusionism has *nothing* to do with GNS modes *or* "incoherence".

6) Focused designs are better (especially in terms of GNS modes)

This is only even possibly true if viewed from a pure design standpoint, and not considering the people playing the game.

Most groups have players with a relatively wide set of needs that they want met, even if a subset of those are actually brought into a particular game.  The appropriateness of a game is going to be based upon how well a given game meets the needs of that group (again, the set of needs they expect the game to meet).

A more focused game will be 'better' only if the needs it satisfies match the needs of the group, with little excluded.

A game that satisfies more needs is more likely to satisfy a given group's needs, presuming that any additional mechanical weight/complexity does not outweigh the value it brings.

Also, a lot of needs of people aren't really around the game itself, but around other things - liking particular dice, not liking other dice, wanting a game lightweight enough to play when inebriated, not wanting to learn more systems, etc.  GNS theory completely ignores these types of needs.

It's true that some needs (and some techniques to satisfy those needs) are inherently contradictory, and that the more focused a game is, the less likely it is to have such inconsistencies.  However:

a) While inconsistency is definitely problematic, it has to be viewed in the context of the game as a whole - a game that satisfies every need a group has, but has a minor inconsistency will, on the whole, be better suited for that group than a game which satisfies only a narrow subset of their needs but has no inconsistencies.

b) While catering to a wider variety of needs increases the chance of inconsistency in design, it's not guaranteed in any way.  Minimizing inconsistency is a very valid goal - however, tighter focus is not inherently a positive (nor is it necessarily a negative).

Generic games also have the advantage of serving needs like "I don't want to learn another damn system", as opposed to learning a new system for each different game/genre.  This can be a *very* strong need, and can easily outweigh any genre-specific value from a focused game - depending on the individuals involved and their priorities, of course.

-----------------------------------------------

You'll notice that there's a lot of little things in GNS theory or thought around it that I don't disagree with.  As I've said, there's some interesting thoughts/ideas in there.  However, I disagree with the *primary conclusions* drawn from the theory, which is why I reject it as a *whole*.

[rant]
My 2c on GNS would be that if you abandon the idea of 'incoherency' being bad, the GNS categories no longer serve any useful purpose, but attempts to use the theory directly to build anything are doomed to failure because the three-way model here is a very crude representation of something quite complex. Its ideas occasionally predict something accurately i.e. you can *sometimes* classify a gamer or a system or identify a conflict, but the error rate is sufficiently high that its more or less useless as far as building anything goes, except with a very particular audience or circumstances.

*G vs. S is a very crude amalgamation of the issues of balance vs. accurate representation, and simplicity of play vs. representation of detail, and better discussed in those terms.  Talking about a 'gamist' player agenda is also awkward because you can split players primarily interested in game concerns into highly competitive min-maxers (some of whom don't seem overly interested in balance) and those who want tactics/ strategy.

*S. vs. N. as a dichotomy is about having a flow of events following bottom-up from world details logically vs. having events happen from a top-down approach that are dramatic or form an interesting story (Edwards' too-narrow narrow scheme of thing would also say not just any story but one that 'addresses a premise). While these things are in conflict to an extent, a good story also has internal consistency and believability, so its still not entirely clear-cut.

Simulation in Edwards' essays I think eventually got divided into 'exploration' of about 5 of so different things, any of which could also be sometimes in conflict with each other, and there's also the problems of games designed to 'simulate' in the sense they provide immersion, those that are highly complex physics emulators , and the distinction of whether simulation is meant to be genre-emulation or pure realism: where do you put a game like Toon, and if its in the same category as Phoenix Command how useful are your categories?

*A G vs. N dichotomy is what nowadays (post-2E D&D) would generally be called "rollplaying vs. roleplaying" aka the Stormwind Fallacy.  There's only a very limited conflict here, with regard to an expectation of players 'playing to lose' if this furthers the story, and attempts at "vanilla narrativism" removing gamist elements such as challenge (e.g. possibility of character death) or game incentives (i.e. character advancement, such as in Trollbabe or InSpectres) have generally resulted in nothing more than a net loss to the game. Players getting excessive 'narrative power' is a bad idea in a highly competitive system as well (give a monkey a wish and it'll fill the world with bananas) but distributed GMing is something that doesn't occur in even a majority of storygames, AFAIK.

So while there are conflicts between things which could because of the models' vagueness be described in G/N/S terms, attempting to action them directly in systems design usually means an overreaction that alienates large swathes of the audience and still leaves some players who would be lumped in the same category unsatisfied. Its very much like how leeching is (rightly) rejected by modern day physicians, even though there are cases where sticking a leech onto someone has medical benefits.  
[/rant]

I snarked earlier that GNS was really about why people won't play V:tM the way RE wants.  While that may have been overly snarky, I do believe that V:tM (or possibly a different WW game) was the original impetus behind the theory, and directly points at the issues I have with the theory.

1) GNS as a division.  "Why aren't people playing V:tM as a deep character and theme-based game?  Obviously, because they're trying to do something else with it".  Here we see the genesis of the GNS split, where Ron elevates his desire to play a certain way into a full category of games.  The error here is the presumption that this is a universal division that is of primary interest to most gamers, and that gamism/simulationism are opposed to narrativism, as opposed to people *just not caring about that style of play*.

2) Requirement of a single GNS mode - clearly, if Vampire didn't support the other modes, then people would *have* to play it as a deep story/character/theme-based game.  Of course, the other alternative is that they'd play something else, instead.  Again, this looks like a lack of acceptance that people just like different things.

3) Again, this seems to be the observation that V:tM can be played in multiple ways, and therefore there's disagreements on how it's played.  The differing goals is again blamed on the system.  This seems to be a common pattern - almost an inability to accept that people just like different things, and so any disagreement must come from an error in the system.

4) Probably comes from the softballing/downplaying of Humanity and other 'theme-based' mechanics, as well as the push to play Sabbat/etc.  What's interesting here is that he sees "incoherence" as the cause, not preferences misaligning with the system.  Cynically, I'd speculate that admitting that drift is a result of personal preferences means that no amount of rules jiggering could get people to play the way he wants them to.

5) Again, we see the fact that people play games in different ways, and the presumption that these differences are due to game design, and not just due to differing expectations.

6) Once again, if the game didn't support these other icky playstyles, then people would play the way he wanted them to.  And, again, this only makes sense if you presume that any confusion is due to a flaw in the rules, as opposed to people just wanting different things out of their leisure activity.

I think the categories themselves are horseshit.

Quote from: robiswrong;725398I snarked earlier that GNS was really about why people won't play V:tM the way RE wants.  While that may have been overly snarky, I do believe that V:tM (or possibly a different WW game) was the original impetus behind the theory, and directly points at the issues I have with the theory.

Reading over some of this stuff. I think your comment was fairly on target. You see it in other gaming circles as well. Though not on the GNS scale.

Someone likes a certain style of gameplay. Say Random Blind Buy games (C*Gs) for example. To them the thrill of opening the box and getting totally random stuff is the be-all and end all. Everyone should be into this great thrill and those who want those dirty old stand alone games are too mentally stunted to appreciate the mystique of collectibles. We must urge publishers to make more collectible elements in their games so that there will be more players to collect with. The fact that it is a failing model is irrelevant. MTG is still around and proof that it is not a failing model. All those hundreds of dead CCGs and dozens of dead publishers just didnt do it right.

yadda yadda. Replace CCG with Narrativist, Eurogame, BDSM, whatever.
Remember to downplay or degrade the other styles and their players.